Canary in the coal mine

 Michael - Alternate Thursdays

Like our protagonist, Kubu, I’m partial to good wine. Maybe this isn’t a coincidence since Stanley also has a taste for the fruit of the vine. Among all the possible negative outcomes of climate change, probably the demise of the current leading vineyards isn’t high up on the list of potential disasters. However, it’s interesting that while the debate about global warming was going on, some wineries were already thinking ahead.

Canary cage complete with oxygen cylinder
 to resuscitate the bird

Spanish wine master, Miguel Torres, said that wine is “the canary in the coal mine,” referring to the old practice of using a canary to predict carbon monoxide accumulation in a mine. When the canary stops singing, get out of there. The wine canary hasn’t stopped singing, but it’s definitely sounding a bit throaty right now.

So what can be done?

One option is just to harvest the grapes earlier, but the balance is often wrong. Alcohol is higher, tannins more bitter, acidity lower. Slow ripening is important, and it’s not only warmer summers that’s a problem. Warmer winters encourage early sprouting, and then a deep frost can damage the plants. 2021 was a particularly horrible year in France—a very mild winter was followed by several days of below freezing temperatures. The country’s total wine harvest was only about two thirds of the usual volume, disastrous for the growers. There are other problems as well. Drought conditions and wild fires have affected vineyards, particularly in South Africa and Australia, but Europe is having a turn now too. Even if the vineyard itself doesn't burn, ash settling on the grapes may later affect the taste of the wine.

Fire in the Cape winelands

Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom. Germany, known for cool climate, and often sweeter, whites is now extending white vineyards into regions that were previously too cold, and producing some satisfactory reds in the warmer areas. So is England where cold resistant cultivars are being replaced by the desirable cultivars that are struggling with the new climates in France. Pinot noir, chardonnay.

Cabernet pfeffer
Looks hardy enough...

A second approach is to plant new varietals, or old varietals that are out of fashion – basically anything that survives hot weather. Some of the winemaking fans of these grapes say they are more interested in preserving historical cultivars than addressing climate change, but I’d guess they have an eye on the thermometer as well. An example is California’s recent interest in cabernet pfeffer. I have no idea what it tastes like. Perhaps I’ll find out at Bouchercon.

Yet another strategy is to find cooler slopes, perhaps not facing the sun as directly, or higher terrain. Some of the larger Spanish wineries began planting at higher altitudes quite a few years before climate change became accepted as a problem in the industry. Now they have a head start. (They are also selecting cuttings from vines that seem more heat resistant. But only time will tell how the wine from that selection will taste.) Generally, moving to cooler areas is successful and it’s happening in Spain, France, and Argentina. But it’s not an easy option for South Africa or Australia, which are already growing grapes in their coolest climates.

In the meanwhile, you may want to stock up your cellars, particularly those pinot noirs and chardonnays. The future ones may not be as good and will be more expensive if they are.

After all, a nice, chilled, white in the shade may take the edge off the heat.

travails at Gustave Eiffel's iron lady

A strike closed the Eiffel Tower for most of last Friday.  The unionized staff and and the tower officials were fed up. They'd had enough and felt unable to protect visitors and themselves from pickpockets operating around the Paris landmark.  The staff and officials demanded more help.
"There have always been pickpockets at the Eiffel Tower, but we are now facing an organized network", said a union representative. The strikers want additional police to be deployed.
The company said it was already cooperating with police to improve security at one of the world's best known tourist draws. The site was closed for about six hours and reopened to visitors in the late afternoon.

The staff protest and strike came a day after Paris authorities launched a drive to improve tourist protection and said theft around Paris' main attractions was on the decline compared to last year.

The last time I went to the Eiffel Tour was when my son was six years old. It was a summer evening, after a long day, but at least with not many people.  I remember how my son complained that we had to go up so many, many stairs.  We were with my friend Jo, and her daughter, the same age, who'd brought our special treat. Jo had suggested and furnished everything for a late night picnic on the Eiffel Tower. Perfect, non? In the summer it remained light for hours, so here we were finally after a long climb on the second level, I think. Both of the kids had gone on 'strike' and said they weren't taking another step and they were starving.  I'd carried a big melon, bottle of wine and Jo, ever the Brit, a flowered tablecloth, bread, cheese and charcuterie. Imagine Paris spread below us and no UTENSILS ie no wine bottle opener, knife or anything to cut with! Poor Jo had forgotten and brought everything but...She ended up finding a plastic knife so les enfants could slice the cheese, saucissons and they tore off the baguette. But alas, the knife broke trying to cut open the sweet smelling honey-dew melon. No bottle opener either, honestly we thought some French person would be carrying one somewhere on the Eiffel tower but zut! Despite the lack of utensils, we ate and les enfants were finally sated, us too. But I kept looking below and thinking how would a melon look if I just let it drop à la David Letterman - I'd remembered the show where he'd dropped a watermelon from multi-storied building once and replayed it in slo-mo...Jo got very British and wouldn't let me drop the melon because she said  I could actually hurt someone and the staff would be waiting to arrest me at the bottom. So we carried the melon and the wine back down the stairs, across the Champs de Mars and onto the Metro.  So our saga had no pickpockets and no wine bottle opener.






Cara - Tuesday

A goat summer or l'été with les chèvres

Somehow I've been spending a lot of time with goats. That's Marshall, the white one who I've misnamed in a previous post and Capucchino behind him who's the queen chèvre of the pen. 

Luxurious quarters that overlook sunflowers, fields of harvested hay for their fellow horses. These chèvres eat organic veggies and even branches from the rosebushes.

Sunflowers nod in the breeze and the bench invites a pause.

Even a deux chevaux and zinnia's nearby.

The day topped off with an apero nearby and I wanted to catch the light hitting a glass of white wine.  Like the French countryside.

But when I walked outside the bistro it felt like I'd stepped into a Spanish village. 

 The white stucco buildings.

 Tiled timeworn steps.

Where do you think this was?

Cara - Tuesday somewhere

Where are you from?

Nowadays there is a lot of emphasis on where things originate.  Some aspects of that are good, and others less so.  For example, take wine.  The origin is so important to the consumer that the makers even protect the regional name. 

Thus port must come from the Douro region of Portugal through the famous port houses of Oporto.  (Most of them are English owned, incidentally.)  This is such a big issue that bilateral trade agreements protect it.  South Africa had to change the name of home-grown ports – made in the traditional fashion from the same cultivars - to Cape Vintage.  Similarly local sparkling wine became Cape Classique instead of champagne.  The only market where this sort of thing isn’t an issue is the US.  No one messes with the US market!  So concoctions known as White Burgundy and Red Burgundy continue to sell in US supermarkets although they have nothing to do with the glorious chardonnays and pinot noirs of Burgundy.  Does it matter?  I doubt it.  The consumers of these wines are under no apprehension that they come from France and they couldn’t care less in any case. 

What determines the issue for them is price.  Then, again, Burgundy is the English name for the French region of Bourgogne, anyway, so…

 On the other hand, it does seem reasonable that a statement like “Made in France” should be protected.  If this appears on a wine, and the wine comes from Algeria, for example, surely the consumer is being misled by false advertising?  Well, yes and no.  A significant amount of “French” wine comes from somewhere else.  The question is definition.  Does made in France mean grown in France, vinified in France, bottled in France, or all three?  The answer is no.  Some guidelines must be met for “made in France” to appear on the label, but it doesn’t mean you are buying 100% French grapes made by a French winemaker bottled in France.

In recent years much fuss has been made about “organic” foodstuffs.  It’s an odd name because the opposite would seem to be “inorganic” which would mean that it didn’t have the normal carbon bonds of the vegetation and animal worlds.  But the term is well understood.  It actually means that the foodstuff was not grown using fertilizers, pesticides, genetic modification, and so on.  Thus it is supposed to be much healthier, more natural, and more expensive.  In fact, once again it depends on where you are from.  Because consumers are so concerned about these issues, most countries have strict verification processes for a farm or winery that proclaims to be organic.  However, the rules can vary widely from country to country.  I remember visiting an organic winery (not in South Africa) and being struck by the strong stink of sulphur in the winery.  Apparently sulphur added to the wine as an antibiotic is allowed.  You just mustn’t spray it on the grapes to stop pests.  Hmmm…

So does “organic” really mean better and healthier?  The answer – according to a survey a few years ago – was yes and no.  The food was fresher, more attractive, and tasted better.  In terms of nutrition and health, there didn’t seem to be much in it.  But that’s not the point.  The consumer has an expectation and a right to expect it to be met.  In the case of wine, my (very limited) experience is that it is better.  And more expensive.  The winery is going the extra mile and that must, on average, translate into quality as well as extra cost.

Diamonds are another good example.  Diamonds have been brilliantly marketed as a rare and beautiful commodity, synonymous with love and lasting commitment.  (“Diamonds are Forever.”)  The success of the industry has much more to do with the presentation to the consumer than the difficulty of wresting precious gems from the bowels of the earth.  So when the issue of “blood diamonds” (or as the industry prefers “conflict diamonds”) became a real concern to diamond lovers, the industry realized that they were facing a real threat.  How could these symbols of love be used to fuel wars, slavery and repression?  The result was the Kimberley Process.  The ultimate answer to 'where are you from?'  Each packet of gems sold now carries a pedigree that indicates its origin and route to sale.  Only countries that subscribe to the Kimberley Process are able to certify the gems and assure consumers that the diamonds have been mined legitimately under fair working conditions and have made their way to market without the addition of any black market stones. It is a well-planned and well-managed process, and pretty well does achieve what it claims.  But like all man-made things it has its flaws.  Zimbabwe has been a signatory since its inception.

So take those origin labels on the things you buy with a pinch of salt.  And don’t be too surprised if you find some iodine mixed in with the sodium chloride.

Michael – Thursday.

Wine

I hope the rest of you found that as funny as I did.

Now, let's get serious.

Brazil. Not a place that immediately springs to mind when you think of fine wines, is it?

The country was largely colonized by folks from European countries where wine is the tipple of choice and where a meal isn’t considered complete without it, and yet Brazilians, on the average, drink less than 3 liters of the stuff, per capita, per year.

Most drink cachaça, much of it in the form of caipirinhas.

Don’t know what cachaça is?

Click here to find out: http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/2010/03/cachaca-brazilian-tipple.html

We also drink lots of beer, most of which is really good. But the making of good wine, until recently, has eluded us – and many would say it eludes us still.

Why?

Well, remember those three rules for earning money in real estate?

Location, location, location?

The same applies to fine wines.

In the northern hemisphere, the grapes used to make Burgundies are grown at latitudes in the neighborhood of 47 degrees.

The ones used to make Barolos and Valpolicellas in latitudes of slightly less than 45.

Portugal’s Douro Valley clocks-in at 41.

The Napa Valley, in California, does well at about 39.

Spain’s Rioja region is at 37.

Algeria’s highlands are at 35.

But if you get any further south than that, the quality falls-off fast.

And the southern hemisphere?

Well, our friends from South Africa (my hat is off to you, Stanley and Michael) grow truly superior wine grapes in the area around the Cape of Good Hope. And so do the Argentineans, in the area around Mendoza, and the Chileans in the Maipo Valley, all of which are located at about the same latitude: 34 degrees.

Brazil’s wine-growing country, what little of it there is, lies as far away from the equator as you can get without crossing the southernmost border. It’s an area in which growing conditions are less than ideal and where wine neither travels nor stores well, but it’s the best we’ve got.

Back in the early days, the colonists really missed their wine.

The rich ones had it shipped to them from the mother country.

And many farmers tried to grow it, but they quickly discovered that a terroir suitable for crops like coffee and sugar cane is the last place you want to start planting wine grapes. The climate in such places tends to be humid, and those were the days before disease-resistant vine clones had been developed, so the first vines the colonists planted ( in São Paulo back in 1532 ) died in short order.

Mostly from funghi like the one shown above.

They did manage to find some places in the State of Rio Grande do Sul (map above) where drinkable (although not very high-quality) reds could be produced and slightly higher-quality whites, but getting them to the markets of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro proved well-nigh impossible. Back then, the roads were very poor. And they stayed that way for a long time – all the way up until the twentieth century. But I’m happy to say that, like just about everything else in Brazil these days, the winds of change are blowing through the country.

The new reality has been heavily influenced by the arrival of, and investments by, a number of international wine companies. They brought winemaking technology and vineyard-management techniques to the industry and invested heavily in the planting of the European grape varieties, Chardonnay and Semillon (for the whites) and Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot (for the reds).

These days, the area around Bento Gonçalves, the heart of Brazil’s wine growing region, has more than 90, 000 acres planted in vines.

But we still have a long way to go. Last year, Brazil exported only 3.3 million dollars worth of wine.  

And, to give you an idea of how little that is, compare it to the 1.6 billion dollars worth exported by Chile.

Still, we’re getting there.

Click here to take a virtual tour of the facilities of Vinícola Aurora, Brazil’s largest winery:

I daresay the sophistication of the operation will surprise you.

Leighton – Monday